Carlyle, speaking to me many years ago of parliamentary government as he had observed the working of it in this country, said that under this system not the fittest men were chosen to administer our affairs, but the 'unfittest.' The subject of the present memoir was scornfully mentioned as an illustration; yet Carlyle seldom passed a sweeping censure upon any man without pausing to correct himself. 'Well, well, poor fellow,' he added, 'I dare say if we knew all about him we should have to think differently.' I do not know that he ever did try to think differently. His disposition to a milder judgment, if he entertained such a disposition, was scattered by the Reform Bill of 1867, which Carlyle regarded as the suicide of the English nation. In his 'Shooting Niagara' he recorded his own verdict on that measure and the author of it. 'For a generation past it has been growing more and more evident that there was only this issue; but now the issue itself has become imminent, the distance of it to be guessed by years. Traitorous politicians grasping at votes, even votes from the rabble, have brought it on. One cannot but consider them traitorous; and for one's own poor share would rather have been shot than have been concerned in it. And yet, after all my silent indignation and disgust, I cannot pretend to be clearly sorry that such a consummation is expedited. I say to myself, Well, perhaps the sooner such a mass of hypocrisies, universal mismanagements, and brutal platitudes and infidelities ends, if not in some improvement then in death and _finis_, may it not be the better? The sum of our sins increasing steadily day by day will at least be less the sooner the settlement is. Nay, have I not a kind of secret satisfaction of the malicious or even of the judiciary kind (_Schadenfreude_, "mischief joy," the Germans call it, but really it is "justice joy" withal) that he they call Dizzy is to do it; that other jugglers of an unconscious and deeper type, having sold their poor mother's body for a mess of official pottage, this clever, conscious juggler steps in? "Soft, you, my honourable friends: _I_ will weigh out the corpse of your mother--mother of mine she never was, but only step-mother and milch cow--and you shan't have the pottage--not yours you observe, but mine." This really is a pleasing trait of its sort; other traits there are abundantly ludicrous, but they are too lugubrious even to be momentarily pleasant. A superlative Hebrew conjuror spell-binding all the great lords, great parties, great interests of England to his hand in this manner, and leading them by the nose like helpless mesmerised somnambulist cattle to such issue! Did the world ever see a _flebile ludibrium_ of such magnitude before? Lath-sword and scissors of Destiny, Pickle-herring and the three Parcæ alike busy in it. This too I suppose we had deserved; the end of our poor old England (such an England as we had at last made of it) to be not a fearful